ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) would be generally agreed to be the most
distinguished French phenomenologist, and his book Phenomenology of Percep-
tion, first published in French by Gallimard in 1945 and in English by Routledge
& Kegan Paul in 1962, is certainly his major work. In it, he first outlines what he
means by “phenomenology”, namely, the description of our direct, pre-reflective
contact with the world around us in perception. The rest of the book consists in
developing a phenomenological account of the various elements in our percep-
tual experience, such as our awareness of our own bodies, the social world of
other people, time and space as they are “lived”, history, freedom and action, and
the cogito. This account enables him to make distinctively original and illuminat-
ing contributions to the discussion of such traditional philosophical topics as the
mind-body problem, the relation of consciousness to the unconscious, the
explanation of human behaviour, the freedom of the will, the relation of the
individual to society and the meaning of history and its relevance to politics. What
emerges from these discussions is a particular view of our humanity, as embod-
ied beings participating actively in the world and finding meaning in it as a result.
